“I own guns. Here’s why I’m keeping them”

Like many Americans, my family history is closely tied to firearms. I was raised with a sense of duty to protect my loved ones. Danger wasn’t something that was abstract or imaginary in my family history or my upbringing, and so we had to learn to deal with it.

I’m not a Second Amendment absolutist, and I am open to changes to our gun laws. But gun ownership is important to me, and responsible individuals must be allowed to make the choice for themselves and their families if they want to own firearms.

Absolutely worth reading, especially with Twitter full of righteous stupidity like this:

So if you define “liberty” as the right to own a gun, go fuck yourself. You are a disgrace to all that’s good and right about America. – Mike Monteiro

Monteiro’s indignant tirade is representative of a sentiment that, in typical fashion, swept across Twitter and fell away in a matter of days—all anger, hate and righteous assurance that the speaker is absolutely right, and that the people they disagree with are not only wrong, but utterly stupid or evil. But for all of this righteousness, all of this anger, it is all hot air.

This sort of thing replaces thinking about an issue, reading about it and reading what other people think and actually considering it, with posturing. It is, ultimately, self-aggrandizing. It accomplishes zero, besides make the person feel good about themselves for their 140 characters.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Jonathan Blank’s piece. He doesn’t argue by denigrating people he disagrees with, or questioning their intelligence or motivations—he makes a calm, reasoned argument for what he thinks.

Blanks argues that, as a black family in Indiana, guns were vital to his family’s defense from the KKK, and that having a gun was necessary to defend his girlfriend’s friend from an abusive husband. His thesis is that people have the right to protect themselves, and a gun is often the only way to do that.

That doesn’t just extend to defending yourself against other individuals, but also against an abusive state. The left is fond of arguing that gun ownership as a check against government violating our liberty is absurd because no one with a shotgun or AR-15 could successfully take on the U.S. military. This argument is absurd. The goal is not simply to defeat an abusive government, but to make it prohibitively difficult and bloody for the government to become tyrannical. And, indeed, it would certainly be possible to defeat an abusive government—the Afghan wars, Iraq war, Vietnam war,… and on and on show what guerrilla fighters can do against an overwhelmingly superior force.

But Blanks makes an even more important point: even if defeat was certain, it would not matter. Individuals have the right to defend themselves against violations of their rights, whether it comes from individuals or the government, and whether or not they will win. And guns are vital to that. There is no liberty if people cannot even attempt to protect themselves.